


Ready

by anonymous_sibyl



Series: Rough & Ready [2]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-12
Updated: 2006-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-04 04:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the only way to win a game is to throw away the rules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ready

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to [Rough](http://anonymous-sibyl.livejournal.com/436987.html). Spoilers for all of season 2.
> 
> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works.

"Brave new world, isn't it?" She waves her hands at the muddy street and camp of tents that passes for their home. Well, her home, because he, and most of the military, are still living on their nice, clean ships, while she and the common folk are down here mucking about in the dirt.

"You would have found better?"

"I would have." She crosses her arms over her chest defensively, before realizing and forcing them to hang loosely at her sides. "Actually, Commander, I did."

"And maybe we would have gotten there," he says. "And maybe all of them would have had a chance. And maybe, just maybe, things would have worked out."

"Accenting the maybes a bit hard, aren't you?" He doesn't answer because, typically, he thinks his point has been made, and it has, for once, but she needs to hear him say it anyway. "Finish it."

"Finish what?"

"And maybe, just maybe, except what? Except I what?"

"It was wrong!"

"It was desperate." She knows he's disgusted with her for thinking that was an excuse. She would have known even without the set of his shoulders and the line of his mouth, but he's not about to deny her the clues to his revulsion. In the life of Lee Adama things are gray when he deems them gray, and not before. "Have you never done anything desperate?"

For the first time in their conversation he turns to face her. She supposes it's so she can see his narrowed eyes and stony glare, and bear the full force of his wrath.

"You know I have."

"Any_thing_," she says, "Not any_one_."

"I thought I was the desperate one that day."

"You weren't the one screaming."

"No. I wasn't." His voice is as flat as his eyes. "I was the one begging."

"You were the one ordering, Commander." How he brings this flare of temper out in her she will never know, but he does, and she rarely feels the need to suppress it with him as she does around others. "Does giving orders make you feel safe?"

"Does taking them scare you?"

They're drawing a crowd, some attracted to their cutting voices, some to the rare sight of a Colonial uniform planetside. She's no longer President, she no longer cares. She wonders if he does.

Apparently he does, because he apologizes. He doesn't look at her when he does, however, instead looks out and over the settlement, past what masquerades as a school, and straight at Baltar's-President Baltar's, she corrects herself-home.

"Perhaps you'd rather apologize to them," she says, gesturing at the crowd, many of who, bored now that the argument seems to be over, are returning to watching the Pyramid game. "For behaving in a most un-officerlike fashion."

"I would rather apologize to you."

"And I would rather you not."

"Why?" he asks, then sighs. "Laura… I _am_ sorry."

"Sorry I tried to steal an election or sorry we stopped frakking?"

"Sorry I gave up."

It seems she should say something to that, make a grand apology for not being moral enough or ladylike enough or for pretending to not understand the offer he'd made when they first found the planet, but she's not wrong now and she wasn't wrong then. She is, however, tired of the constant arguing, of the way they flare up each and every time they're near each other.

"Personally, Lee, I'm sorry we stopped frakking."

"Yeah, well." He matches her grin with his own. "It's not as if we had any place to do that, or any reason to be together." He nods his head toward Baltar's ship. "You think the president would loan us a room?"

She nods her head toward the school. "I have a room. A room that's empty right now. A nice, big, empty room."

"You got a bed in that school?" he asks with a laugh.

"I've got a desk." She reaches out and touches his arm, below his insignia. "Wouldn't be the first time."

"You're serious, aren't you?"

"I was beginning to think I was going to have to kiss you right here in front of all of civilization before you figured that out."

For once he doesn't have a reply. No preaching about ethics, no sparring for control, Lee simply reaches down and takes her hand, pulls her behind him into the tent. She can feel the mud spattering up the back of her legs as she runs.

"I have no idea how to close that," he says about the tent flap they've just passed through, unbuttoning his tunic with one hand and running the other up her leg, smearing the mud as he does. "So you're going to have to. And you're going to have to now unless you want everyone to see Miss Roslin spread naked over her desk."

"Miss Roslin," she says, quirking an eyebrow. "I almost think I prefer that to Madam President."

"Close the tent, Laura." He tosses his jacket onto a student's chair. "Now."

When she turns around he's sitting atop her desk. "This seems familiar, Commander."

"Yes. It does. I'd offer to slam you into a wall and kiss you but you don't have walls to speak of so we'd end up on our backsides in the mud."

"Not exactly the atmosphere I was going for," she says with a smile.

"So you had a plan?"

"I had a whim." She steps between his outstretched legs and quivers when he tightens them around her.

"Come closer." He hooks his leg behind her and tugs until she falls into his hands. "Tell me about this whim."

"It was more like caprice."

"An impulse?"

"An _urge_."

He buries his mouth in her throat, licking and nuzzling, and those hands of his are roaming all over her body, almost as if they have a life and a mind of their own. "You want to tell me about these urges, Miss Roslin?"

"I've been repressing them for so long, I'm rather afraid to let them out." She shrugs her shoulders to better let him slide her blouse down her arms, then tilts her head back to give him better access to the flesh he seems determined to explore. "I'm sure you can understand that, Commander."

"The repression or the fear?"

Whatever is in his eyes when he asks that makes her shut her own, because this was supposed to be a whim, one happy moment to last until the next, and now it seems like something more. "Why does it always have to be like this, Lee?"

"This?"

"Us." She pulls one sleeve back up, and nervously pushes her hair behind her ear. "Repression. Fear. Sadness."

"Maybe it doesn't."

She gasps when he bends in and rakes his mouth across her neck, dragging teeth against flesh until they meet blouse. He takes the cloth between his teeth and tugs it down her shoulder as far as he can, before returning his mouth to her arm.

"Maybe, Laura, we think too much and act too little. Maybe we talk more than we should and say the wrong words. Maybe," he says, accenting his maybes as he did at the start of their conversation, "all we need to do is be here. Together."

"Maybe," she echoes, gasping again when he turns his attention to her bra, pulling the straps down and licking a damp trail across her exposed breasts. "Are you sure?"

"Uncertainty," he remarks, looking up at her, boyish smile she hasn't seen in quite some time on his face. "That's new on you."

"No," she says. "It's not. Not at all."

"Trust me, Laura."

His hands are working miracles on her body, her skirt is sliding up her legs, and she wants to trust him. There seems no harm in it, now, here at the end of the universe, or at least less harm than ever before. What does she have to lose? She asks that out loud, and Lee, unsurprisingly, has an answer.

"You have everything to lose, and so do I. But let it be, Laura. For once, just let _us_ be."

She grins as she twines her fingers in his hair and pulls him closer. "Maybe, Lee. Maybe."


End file.
